TM Forum has announced its support for the Wholesale Applications Community initiative announced at GSMA’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week.

“The TM Forum has been calling for industry collaboration in this area for some time, and we strongly support the Wholesale Applications Community and its goals,” said Keith Willetts, CEO and Chairman of the Board, TM Forum. “The majority of operators in the new Community are already active members of the Forum, and we plan to work closely with the new group to ensure its success.”

Many challenges exist in managing the underlying business process and data for ‘long tail’ content and applications, including digital fulfillment, customer care, revenue and settlements. The Forum, which delivers business-critical standards to address the complex IT challenges communications service providers face, has been leading pioneering work in the area of content distribution and service delivery management since 2007.

“It’s critical that operators move quickly to establish value in the app market, while avoiding the mistakes of the past,” commented Willetts. “In the past, we’ve seen the market take a siloed approach to developing and delivering applications, only to be faced with significant integration and scalability challenges. It’s important for operators to adopt a common approach going forward, and this will inevitably depend on them also aligning with a standard IT architecture. TM Forum delivers the IT architecture standards and best practices that enable this kind of agility and which will be a critical success factor for a wholesale applications environment.”

Key Facts:
• TM Forum plans to work closely with the Wholesale Applications Community to ensure its success by helping to address underlying IT challenges facing operators seeking to add and derive value from the applications market.
• With billions of customers touching the network cloud to conduct business every day, service providers have a unique opportunity to add value for application developers. As a key intermediary between content developers and downstream device users, operators can leverage their cloud capabilities to improve customer engagement experience at both ends of the value chain
• TM Forum has been leading industry collaboration activities focused on the digital value-chain since 2007, when its Content Encounter program was launched to tackle the challenges in the creation, delivery and monetization of digital media services and address the impact of these services on revenue, operations and customer experience.
• The Forum’s industry leading initiatives in management of new technologies such as LTE, cloud services, revenue management and are expected to play a key role in ensuring the success of the Community.

With more than 700 corporate members in 195 countries, TM Forum is the world’s leading industry association focused on enabling best-in-class IT for service providers in the communications, media and cloud service markets. The Forum provides business-critical industry standards and expertise to enable the creation, delivery and monetization of digital services.

TM Forum brings together the world’s largest communications, technology and media companies, providing an innovative, industry-leading approach to collaborative R&D, along with wide range of support services including benchmarking, training and certification. The Forum produces the renowned international Management World conference series, as well as thought-leading industry research and publications.